Like I said yesterday, before I went away I made myself a bag for my buys. I don’t know about where you are, but in Wales (not England) we have to pay for any shopping bags and my current ‘bag for life’ is very uninspiring. Making my own is something I have been meaning to do for some time so I’m happy that I can finally tick it off my list of things to do.

The inspiration for this first attempt came from a market day bag I saw in a recent issue of ‘Mollie Makes‘ magazine. As I can’t resist adapting patterns I decided to use this as an opportunity to practise my quilting. I discovered as I went along that a number of changes were required because of a lack of materials, lack of time and sadly lack of organisation!

First step – choosing the materials

I very much want to make a bag, quilt, cushion anything really out of this:

I haven’t had much time to produce this week as I went to stay at my sister’s over the weekend with daughter and school ted in tow. It wasn’t the most relaxing of weekends as it involved National Rail, Primark on a Saturday and freezing temperatures, but fun was had by all and made even better for me as I finished two successful sewing projects prior to going.

No1 was the Moda Quilt Along trivet I described in my previous post and No2 was the last, so far, in a long line of ….well, ok only four…. purses. Here’s where it started:

You can probably see that I’m not exactly quilting along more like quilting a bit. As my attention span is short and my fabric supplies limited I thought I’d best focus on a block at a time to make something small, but usable and finished. So I was googling patterns for pan mats or what I now know are called ‘trivets’ (yes, I’d never heard that word before either…what, you mean that’s just me?) and stumbled across a blog called cotton way. This site not only had lovely pictures of trivets, beautiful – really want to buy that – fabric, but also mentioned the Moda Friendship Quilt Along.

This started another 3 hour trawl of the internet looking for the ideal easy, but not too easy block. I opted for no 10 and in order to avoid ultimate wonkiness I took my time……..three blocks in one day, more like one in three nights! What? I’ve got NCIS to watch.